Dream survives heinous Nantucket crime

Sunday

Dec 26, 2010 at 2:00 AM

NANTUCKET — Gently rifling through a set of shallow drawers in his Nantucket studio on a frigid December morning, John Lochtefeld needs only a minute or two to find it, even though he rolled it out about 40 years ago.

MOLLY A.K. CONNORS

NANTUCKET — Gently rifling through a set of shallow drawers in his Nantucket studio on a frigid December morning, John Lochtefeld needs only a minute or two to find it, even though he rolled it out about 40 years ago.

"This has always been a great favorite," the 77-year-old gray-haired grandfather says, pointing to a blue-hued print titled "Voyage to the warm seas," which he crafted in 1970, his family's second summer on Nantucket.

The aquatint, depicting a large multimasted tall ship voyaging over a sea populated by a large whale, sea serpents and a variety of oversized fish, is classic Lochtefeld: inspired by the whaling industry, hemmed on the margins by letters from an ancient alphabet — and downright fanciful.

"I found out I was much happier creating drawings and pictures that were out of my head," Lochtefeld said.

The studio is filled with hundreds of his oil and acrylic paintings, wooden sculptures and prints. Lochtefeld made all of the items in the studio — except one.

Directly in the line of sight of anyone who walks in the room is a stack of books with blue jacket covers and yellow letters.

It was written by Lochtefeld's then 44-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Anne Lochtefeld, who was stabbed 23 times by Thomas Toolan III, an estranged boyfriend in 2004.

The book, "Tell Me About Your Dreams ...," was one of the last projects she finished before her death.

"I'm sorry she's not here to see it, but she's gone," Lochtefeld said of his daughter's book, which was ready to go to the printer when she died — corrected proofs of the manuscript were found on her coffee table.

An appeal of Toolan's life sentence for murdering Elizabeth is expected to be argued next month.

To their great discomfort, Elizabeth's murder threw the quiet artist's family and Nantucket under the unwelcome klieg lights of the national media. Even after blitz coverage of the murder trial, the family hasn't been left in peace, Lochtefeld said, because they still receive requests from television shows asking for interviews.

The family dislikes the idea that the story of Elizabeth — who spoke four languages, visited China shortly after it opened up to foreigners, visited East Berlin before The Wall fell, and built a multimillion-dollar construction services business from her New York City apartment — would be told in a way that it would interrupted by TV commercials for automobiles.

"The people that want to turn it into public entertainment," Lochtefeld said, his voice trailing off. "No."

"It takes away from the dignity of the person who lived," he said.

But Elizabeth's dignity, as well as her determination and joy, live on in the book. She wrote it after the nonprofit she'd help found to help young people achieve their goals, the University of Dreams, had started to take off. The book gives "deceptively simple" advice about making dreams come true, her father said.

"I was delighted by some of her insights," he said.

In a three-hour interview, it would seem that some of Elizabeth's advice was informed not only by her own life experiences, but also her father's.

"What you really want is a dream of your own. One that comes from your center, your soul," Elizabeth wrote. "It comes from you. It is a part of you."

Lochtefeld didn't start drawing until age 3. His first masterpiece was a mural on his parents' bedroom wall in West Virginia.

"It was not critically well-received," he said. But he's been drawing ever since, encouraged by a father who brought paper home from work, by nuns at the Catholic elementary school who supplied their students crayons and colored paper and, eventually, by the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1955.

Why Notre Dame?

"It became the darling of working-class America," he said of the school. "I couldn't break my father's heart by not going there."

But art?

"(My father) never had the slightest idea what I did with my life, but never said a word against it," Lochtefeld said.

"Your dreams will take you to meet people and see places you never imagined, you'll be amazed at what you encounter," she wrote.

Lochtefeld met his wife, Judith, through a mutual friend in 1955 and married a year later. After he was drafted into the Army, the couple moved to Hawaii, where he worked the night shift as a radio operator and went to class during the day. He earned a master's of fine arts degree in 1958.

"I never in the world would have chosen the University of Hawaii to study art, but circumstances chose me," he said.

Discharged in 1958 after two years of military service, Lochtefeld started teaching, first at Punahou School — about 20 years before President Barack Obama graduated — then at a series of small colleges, spending about 20 years at Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y., which closed in 2007.

"I got a great deal of joy to find someone who was open, and watching the progress," he said of teaching.

He and his family spent their summers on Nantucket for years. When he retired from teaching in the mid-1980s, he settled on the island full time.

Lochtefeld said he realized there was simply nothing else he wanted to do with his life. He figured if he worked hard enough, he could become a good artist.

"The really best of them not only are truly gifted but they work a lot," said Lochtefeld, who has thrown away hundreds of sketchbooks full of drawings he knows he'll never use to create a painting or etching.

"Troubles and setbacks will happen. ... Find a way to get past the obstacles," she wrote.

"She was the victim of an evil person," Lochtefeld said. But Lochtefeld's life, full of family and the freedom to spend his retirement working on the art he loves, is not a bitter one. If hate festers in his heart, it doesn't shine through his placid demeanor.

"We're at peace with the fact that everybody has so many days on Earth, and when they're over, they're over," he said.

"(Elizabeth) had 44 years, and she lived every inch of it."

But how can he make peace with the violence that ripped the third of his five children from his life?

"I've left (Thomas Toolan III) to God and to the state of Massachusetts," Lochtefeld said of his daughter's murderer. "I've moved on. You have to. You have to accept a higher power."

Lochtefeld said his Catholicism has been "quite a comfort." During the murder trial, it was reported that Judith Lochtefeld quietly comforted Dolores Toolan, Thomas Toolan's mother, during a court recess. After Toolan was convicted, the family apparently offered words of comfort, not hate, to the Toolans.

"Anger, hatred and vengeance are corrosive emotions that destroy those who indulge in them," Catherine Lochtefeld, Elizabeth's sister, said at the time. "We do not rejoice that Mr. Toolan's parents, for all purposes, lost their son."

"And then before you know it, dreams take off. Fly with your dream. ..."

Lochtefeld said he and his wife didn't travel to Europe until they were in their 50s; putting five children through private colleges is expensive. But since then, they've traveled throughout Italy about a dozen times, which he says has helped him continue to find "new crannies, new nooks," and not fall into a rut.

"A lot of times, I'll make a drawing out of my head and (it's) half Venice and half Nantucket," he said. Lochtefeld said he feels for people who — unlike he, his daughter and his wife, who went back to school to become a reading specialist — never pursued their dreams.

"I've met people who come in my studio and say, 'When I was getting out of high school, I wanted to go to art school,'" but were discouraged, he said.

"(They're) filled with regret because they didn't say, 'I'm going to art school and whatever happens, happens,'" Lochtefeld said.

Lochtefeld's way of expressing himself is often as colorful and distinctive as the approach he's taken to his art — a building isn't tall and modern, it's "a strange ice cube that goes up 40 stories."

And he doesn't see himself as getting older. Rather, death is some sort of living creature in a race to the end.

"Don't look behind you, he might be gaining on you," he said.

He has 10 grandchildren, two who seem to show a particular affinity for art, but at least one of them, like her grandfather, is quiet about it.

"I'd never thought of myself as intimidating, but they don't come to me and say, 'Hey look at what I did!'" he said of his grandchildren.

Through the years, he's watched older artists cope with their aging bodies and knows how he'll cope, too.

"Some of them keep up right to the end, and I intend to do the same," he said.

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